G-A-Y Bar is celebrating ten years since it swung its doors open and shone a hot pink spotlight on Soho, bringing an unabashed slice of pure pop to the queer high street! Owner Jeremy Joseph recalls just a few of the highlights from the last decade…
Eurovision
The funny thing about Eurovision is that it doesn’t matter how many Union Jacks we hand out, by the time they come to the scoring they seem to end up on the floor and everybody’s cheering for another country. Like this year, I panicked because the bar wasn’t that busy when Eurovision started with the UK entry and then suddenly the bar got packed after Englbert had been on, and it was so obvious that everyone at the bar wanted Sweden to win!
A community bar
My background goes back to the Royal Oak and that was part of a local community in Hammersmith. You think about the signings and the pop videos when it comes to G-A-Y Bar, but also the events like the HIV testing, the X Factor, the Olympics, the football and England matches, they are all things that people may not associate with G-A-Y but when we do them they are fantastic.
This year, during the opening and closing of the Olympic ceremonies the atmosphere was just amazing. Even for the Royal wedding the manager Scott insisted on opening from 9am, and I thought who would be in the bar at that time?
On the day I got up to walk Hayley and went through the bar and it was packed! I liked the fact that people naturally thought to come to G-A-Y to watch it.
Pop stars
The signings have always been good fun. We’ve always tried to come up with silly ways of trying to get the acts to the bar.
We’ve done some strange things, like The Saturdays arriving on the back of bikes – we thought we’d lost them because the bikes didn’t turn up and they ran late! Geri came on the back of a horse down Old Compton Street, which caused a huge fuss.
We had Girls Aloud arrive in a pink Cadillac. Alexandra Burke in a red sports car. Dannii Minogue was the most paps I’ve ever seen outside the bar, it was absolutely ridiculous. We also had McFly, Joe McElderry and Rachel Stevens.
When Madonna performed for G-A-Y at the Astoria her management wanted it to be just G-A-Y customers, so people started queuing outside G-A-Y Bar from the moment Camp Attack closed.
Even people guaranteed to get their wristband queued! [G-A-Y Manager] Michael and I decided that if people were willing to stay up all night, we were going to do the same and we gave out teas and coffees and biscuits to everyone and it was so much fun, the whole atmosphere outside the bar was amazing.
• G-A-Y Bar (30 Old Compton Street, Soho, W1D 4UR) celebrates its 10th Birthday on Wednesday 21st November when all drinks will be just £1.50, plus for 10 hours between 2pm-midnight at 10 past every hour for ten minutes all drinks will be just £1!
Photos by www.ChrisJepson.com, Jacob Love, Rob Cable & wwwJoel-Ryder.com.
